Letter: Writer’s satire was misinterpreted

Ross Wilkinson’s outraged letter (“False caricatures rouse hatred,” Sept. 19) in response to Elizabeth Thomas’s letter (“No ID? No problem,” Sept. 7) would have been entirely justified and appropriate if Ms. Thomas had written what Mr. Wilkinson thought she had written.

Ms. Thomas was not satirizing New Hampshire residents who voted for President Donald Trump. Instead, she was satirizing the claims that a mythical “3,000 undocumented people came in and asked to vote.”

Ms. Thomas’s satire of the claims that there were thousands of fraudulent, undocumented voters joked that, “They didn’t have ID but they really wanted to vote so we gave them ballots anyway. Perhaps we were wrong to do that, but we weren’t sure, and when in doubt be positive.” “They” were the mythical fraudulent voters from out of state who supposedly came here to vote for Hillary Clinton, not the legitimate New Hampshire residents who voted for President Trump.

Ms. Thomas concluded her fictional satire of the fraudulent voter allegations with, “We realized we had done the wrong thing when we interviewed them as they were leaving. They said they couldn’t read English and didn’t understand the instructions so they drew pictures on the ballots of the president they wanted. These can’t be used, of course, so we had to discard them.”

Her satire pretended that the nonexistent votes of the nonexistent fraudulent voters “didn’t go to Hillary” despite the attempts of the mythical, nonexistent “3,000 undocumented people” to vote illegally for her.

Ms. Thomas’s satire would offend people who sincerely believe the myth of busloads of fraudulent out-of-staters who supposedly voted against President Trump (though oddly not against Governor Sununu), but it did not in any way denigrate folks who voted for President Trump.